When to Wear a Red Bonnett

David Garrioch

  • The Politics of Appearance: Representation of Dress in Revolutionary France by Richard Wrigley
    Berg, 256 pp, £15.99, October 2002, ISBN 1 85973 504 5

On a wintry Paris day a decade before the French Revolution, the young Manon Phlipon did something daring. Left alone at home one day, she took it into her head to dress up in clothes belonging to the family servant: a ragged blue ankle-length dress with a long, faded red apron, and a rough cotton shawl and hood over the top. Thus attired, she went out into the street and headed off, ‘running like a real peasant girl, pushing everyone who got in my way, getting pushed by people who would have stepped aside for me if they had seen me in my fine clothes’. For Manon, a middle-class girl who a few years later would become known as Madame Roland, the politically active wife of a minister in the French Revolutionary Government, dressing down was a small but liberating gesture of rebellion. It freed her from both the obligations and the privileges of her class.

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Vol. 25 No. 7 · 3 April 2003 » David Garrioch » When to Wear a Red Bonnett (print version)
Pages 32-33 | 2938 words